Gnomedex calendar the microformat way

Dean then started to talk about the power of the enclosure element in RSS 2.0. What is great about it is that it enables one to syndicate all sorts of digital content. One can syndicate video, music, calendar events, contacts, photos and so on using RSS due to the flexibility of enclosures.

Amar then showed a demo using Outlook 2003 and an RSS feed of the Gnomedex schedule he had created. The RSS feed had an item for each event on the schedule and each item had an iCalendar file as an enclosure. Amar had written a 200 line C# program that subscribed to this feed then inserted the events into his Outlook calendar so he could overlay his personal schedule with the Gnomedex schedule. The point of this demo was to show that RSS isn’t just for aggregators subscribing to blogs and news sites.

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The X2V application is just a massive XSLT file, it is available under the Creative Commons, so feel free to tinker. I built it in XML (XSLT) so it could easily used by other platforms and languages (PHP, Python, Ruby, and others with XML libraries). X2V is a work in progress, so if you spot problems, or have ideas, feel free to contact me with suggestions/comments.